One hundred years ago, in April 1917, the author Virginia Woolf embarked on a mission that would change her life. The 35-year-old travelled east by train from her Richmond townhouse to the cramped, damp-ridden studio in Chelsea where the writer Katherine Mansfield lived. Here, Woolf would ask a favour of Mansfield, who, despite being six years younger, had made more of a literary name for herself than Woolf had by that stage.

Although Woolf tentatively considered Mansfield a friend, she had her doubts about this charismatic New Zealander, privately dubbing her an “utterly unscrupulous character”. But Woolf knew her proposal would draw them into a close alliance.

Woolf and her husband had recently purchased a hand-operated printing press, and intended to set up their own publishing house. Now she was pinning all her hopes on convincing her new friend to provide the imprint’s very first commission.

Katherine Mansfield in snapshot from 1917 taken by Lady Ottoline Morrell

Mansfield was quick to accept – and, in doing so, she and Woolf established a professional connection that would come to deepen their personal bond. Over the coming years, they would meet each other regularly and exchange affectionate letters.

Today, as a pair of friends and writers, we are well aware of the pressures and privileges that come with working together. We met as young English teachers in Japan, secretly scribbling stories in the breaks between lessons.

In the years that followed, we supported one another on the path to becoming published authors, critiquing early drafts, celebrating successes and providing a sympathetic ear as the rejection slips stacked up.

Knowing how much we relied on each other, we wondered whether our literary heroines of the past might not have formed similarly close bonds. But although we could come up with plenty of male duos – William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley – we struggled to name many similar pairs of women who wrote.

Support network: authors Emily Midorikawa and Emma Claire Sweeney

Scouring museum and library archives for evidence of the confidantes of lauded authors such as Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot and Woolf, we discovered that behind each of these great women was another woman. And, yet, these fascinating alliances have often been overlooked.

History did record the relationship between Mansfield and Woolf, although they are usually remembered as bitter foes. But, in fact, even their rivalry had its advantages. Although their creative sparring sometimes caused Woolf pain, it also spurred her on to produce some of her best work. After Mansfield’s early death at the age of 33, Woolf found herself struggling to write. “There’s no competitor,” she lamented, “for our friendship had so much that was writing in it.”

When Woolf was trying to come to terms with the loss of Mansfield, she had no idea that her literary forebears had relied upon similarly close bonds with other female writers. The early biographies painted Eliot, Brontë and Austen as isolated individuals. Eliot supposedly endured a lonely existence, ostracised for “living in sin” with the literary critic George Henry Lewes. Brontë and her similarly forsaken sisters languished in a moorland parsonage. And Austen was a bookish spinster – so shy she hid her manuscripts from the relatives she lived with.

The reality, we found, was far more complex. It turns out that Eliot enjoyed a close epistolary friendship with perhaps the only other woman who could truly understand her experience of literary fame – the American writer Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of the international best-seller Uncle Tom’s Cabin. During the many years of their transatlantic correspondence, they confided in each other about their work and families, their experiences of public censure and their private troubles. When Eliot wrote her last novel, Daniel Deronda, in 1876, she discussed the subject of racial prejudice with Stowe, who applauded Eliot’s creation of a Jewish hero and heroine – a challenge to the Victorian status quo.

Confidante: Harriet Beecher Stowe exchanged many letters with George Eliot

Further back, in 1831, Charlotte Brontë sought a creative alliance beyond her family – one that would eventually take her far from her parsonage home. As a boarder at Roe Head School in Yorkshire, she forged one of her closest friendships with the sharp-tongued, radical Mary Taylor, who would go on to publish the early feminist novel Miss Miles.

A decade later, Taylor persuaded Brontë to set sail with her for the Belgian capital of Brussels. Here, both women studied European languages, and Brontë’s two years in this foreign city, where she fell in love with her married tutor, inspired her future books Villette and The Professor.

Charlotte Bronte’s close friend, Mary Taylor

As the years passed, Taylor encouraged her friend to make her work more political, and a character based on the spirited Taylor – Rose Yorke – even made it into the pages of Brontë’s novel Shirley.

Earlier still in history, Austen ignored rigid class lines to befriend family governess and amateur playwright, Anne Sharp. Sharp offered astute critiques of her friend’s novels, and Austen helped Sharp out by acting in one of her household plays. But such a socially unacceptable connection would prove too much for Austen’s descendants, who whitewashed this friendship from her first biography.

Jane Austen

What has become clear from our research is just how much these, and so many other great female writers, relied on their author friends for support. For too long their stories have been ignored, distorted or even written out of literary lore.

Now, it is surely time to share and celebrate these friendships, so that female readers and writers of the future can draw inspiration from this powerful tradition of sisterhood.

‘A Secret Sisterhood: The hidden friendships of Austen, Brontë, Eliot and Woolf’ by Emily Midorikawa and Emma Claire Sweeney is out now (Aurum Press, £20)

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